It's official—PMC has just become home to two million articles! The record-breaking article, which came from the American Journal of Medical Genetics Part B: Neuropsychiatric Genetics, became publicly available in the PMC archive on June 23. This new PMC milestone has occurred almost three years to the day since PMC reached its last one: the one-million article mark in June 2007. See also: PubMed Central Hits One Million Article Mark.

The Public Access & PMC page has been redesigned for greater clarity and usability. In addition to including a list of the FAQs at the top, the new page features a table illustrating all the ways to find various reference numbers for an article: the PMID, NIHMSID, and most important, the PMCID, which must be used to demonstrate compliance in terms of the NIH Public Access Policy.

Four new members have been appointed to serve on the PMC National Advisory Committee: Philip Bourne, of the University of California, San Diego; Sophia Colamarino, an independent consultant in San Francisco; Paul Courant, of the University of Michigan; and Patricia Thibodeau, of Duke University. Each member will serve a 4-year term. The next meeting of the committee is scheduled for Friday, June 17, 2011. For more information on the committee, see PMC National Advisory Committee.

PMC has gotten a facelift-- or more accurately, an interface-lift! The home page, search page and other PMC informational pages have all undergone an overhaul, in order to provide users with easier navigation, enhanced features, and a look and feel that is more consistent with other recently updated NCBI sites, such as PubMed and Bookshelf. Additional new features and updates will be coming soon. For more information on navigating the new site, see the article in the July-August issue of the NLM Technical Bulletin.

A video celebrating PMC's first decade is now available for viewing on the NCBI YouTube Channel. The PMC 10th Anniversary Video can also be found on the regular YouTube site.

The following new members have been appointed to serve on the PMC National Advisory Committee: Martha Bedard, Dean of Libraries at the University of New Mexico; and Lorraine Haricombe, Dean of Libraries at the University of Kansas and a member of SPARC's board. The next meeting of the committee is scheduled for June 19, 2012. For more information, see PMC National Advisory Committee.

The PMC user's guide, PMC Help has been updated to include new and improved information on navigating the site as well as descriptions and instructions on using the new search functions, such as Limits and Advanced Search Builder. Further updates will also be forthcoming.

NCBI has developed a new web presentation style called PubReader, which offers you an easier way to use your Web browser to read the articles in PMC. Designed particularly for enhancing readability and navigation on tablet and other small screen devices, PubReader can also be used on desktops and laptops and from multiple web browsers. For more information on PubReader, see the article in the November-December issue of the NLM Technical Bulletin.

As of February 1, 2013, the following new members have been appointed to serve on the PMC National Advisory Committee: Ms. Sharon Terry of the Genetic Alliance; Dr. C. Victor Jongneel of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Dr. Bevin Engelward of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Dr. Randall Morse of the Wadsworth Center; and Dr. Adelita Cantu of the University of Texas. For more information, see PMC National Advisory Committee.

PMC is pleased to announce the new OA web service, designed to allow tool developers an easier way to find content in the PMC open access subset. Until now, it has not been easy for outside users to determine which articles in the subset are new or have been updated recently. Our new OA web service addresses this need. It provides a simple API to allow you to query the subset, to find PDF or tgz (tarred-gzipped) format files, either by article ID, or by date/time ranges. More information, along with examples, is available from the documentation page, at OA Web Service. Your feedback is welcome; please send it to the PMC Help Desk, at pubmedcentral@ncbi.nlm.nih.gov.

JATS-Con is a conference for users of the Journal Article Tag Suite, that is, users of any of the "NLM DTDs" or NISO Z39.96. JATS-Con will take place on the NIH campus in Bethesda, Maryland on October 22 and 23, 2013.

The full program is now available, as are proceedings from previous years.

There is no charge for the conference; however, space is limited so registration is required.

You may also sign up for a pre-conference tutorial on October 21, 2013. Details are on the Tutorial Registration page.

PMC has recently replaced the PMC-News mailing list and its accompanying RSS feed with a new PMC-Announce list and a new RSS feed. Please note that the older list and feed have now been retired. To subscribe to the new announcement list, see https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/mailman/listinfo/pmc-announce/. To see the new RSS feed, update your news reader to subscribe to https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/about/new-in-pmc/?format=rss.

PMC has recently released an updated version of its PubReader view. The new version (1.2) includes a "search this page" feature that allows you to find specific terms within the article. The latest source code is also available from the GitHub repository.

PMC has just released an upgrade to our ID converter, now dubbed the PMCID - PMID -Manuscript ID - DOI Converter. This utility allows you to start with the unique identifier for an article that is in PMC, and find additional unique identifiers that may apply to the article. Improvements include support for DOIs, auto-detection of the ID type based on its format, and enhanced output. It also provides output in any of several different formats: HTML, XML, JSON, or CSV. This tool uses an underlying web service, that is also publicly available for those needing programmatic access to this data. See the ID Converter API documentation.

As of February 21, 2014, PMC became home to three million articles! As listed on our home page, the content has been provided in part by 1441 full participation journals, 277 NIH Portfolio journals and 2470 selective deposit journals. For related information on PMC milestones, see these announcements from 2007 and 2010, respectively.

PMC is happy to announce the addition of a citation exporter feature. This feature makes it easy to retrieve either styled citations that you can copy/paste into your manuscripts, or to download them into a format compatible with your bibliographic reference manager software.

When viewing an Entrez search results page, each result summary will now include a "Citation" link. When, clicked, this will open a pop-up window that you can use to easily copy/paste citations formatted in one of three popular styles: AMA (American Medical Association), MLA (Modern Language Association), or APA (American Psychological Association). In addition, the box has links at the bottom that can be used to download the citation information in one of three machine-readable formats, which most bibliographic reference management software can import.

The same citation box can also be invoked from an individual article, either in classic view (with the "Citation" link among the list of formats) or the PubReader view, by clicking on the citation information just below the article title in the banner.

These human-readable styled citations, and machine-readable formats, will be available through a public API, and we will be providing more details about that in another announcement, on the pmc-utils-announce mailing list. Please subscribe to that list if you are interested.

In order to facilitate text and data mining for articles in the Open Access Subset, we are now providing plain text files for those articles on our FTP site. These files contain the full text of the article, extracted either from the XML source files, or (for those articles that don't have XML) the PDF files. Users are directly and solely responsible for compliance with copyright restrictions and are expected to adhere to the terms and conditions defined by the copyright holder (see the PMC Copyright Notice).

These text files are bundled in gzipped archives. Note that these files are quite large (each greater than one gigabyte). They are available for download as:

• ftp://ftp.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pub/pmc/articles.txt.0-9A-B.tar.gz
• ftp://ftp.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pub/pmc/articles.txt.C-H.tar.gz
• ftp://ftp.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pub/pmc/articles.txt.I-N.tar.gz
• ftp://ftp.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pub/pmc/articles.txt.O-Z.tar.gz

These files are updated every week, on Saturday.

For more information, see the Bulk Packages of OA Articles section of our FTP Service page.

PMC includes some journals published by US government agencies that make their articles available under a Creative Commons CC0 (public domain) license. Some other journals also apply a CC0 license to selected articles in PMC. All these articles may be used and reproduced without special permission. However, anyone using the material is requested to properly cite and acknowledge the source.

You may now search for CC0 articles by using special filters in both PMC (cc0 license[filter]) and PubMed (pmc cc0 license[filter]). These filters are based on license information that is provided to PMC by publishers and encoded as machine-readable identifiers in the source XML of each article. For more information, see the Open Access Subset page.

Please bear in mind that these articles, although made available under a CC0 license, may still contain photographs or illustrations copyrighted by other commercial organizations or individuals that may not be used without obtaining prior approval from the holder of the copyright.

The PMC Overview and FAQ have been updated to provide more information on the Scientific Quality Review Process for journals that apply to participate in PMC.

In 2014, PMC implemented a scientific and editorial quality review procedure whereby expert consultants from outside the National Library of Medicine (NLM) conduct an independent review of journals seeking to participate in PMC. This was in response to a significant increase in new publishers and journals applying to participate in PMC, many of which are unknown to NLM in terms of quality and publishing practices. The independent review, which was approved by the PMC National Advisory Committee (see minutes from June 10, 2014), follows an assessment by NLM that the journal meets NLM’s criteria for its collection, as outlined in the Collection Development Manual.

PMC also recently updated the minimum requirement on the number of substantive, peer-reviewed articles needed before a journal can apply to PMC. The new 25-article minimum ensures that the reviewers have a sufficient amount of content on which to base their recommendation for inclusion in PMC. The new minimum article requirement takes effect on January 1, 2016. Publishers are encouraged to use the 25-article minimum as a guideline in the interim when submitting applications.

As of August 2016, PMC is home to four million articles! To make this wealth of full-text content easier to navigate, PMC has rolled out a few updates:

1) Search Result Filters
On all search results pages, you will now see filters (similar to PubMed’s filters) on the left-hand side that allow you to filter your results by article attributes, publication date, research funder, and search fields. These filters replace the Limits page and allow you to more readily:

• find open access articles (PMC has more than 1.35 million open access articles that can be reused according to their license statements),
• explore PMC’s rich historical content from NLM's back issue digitization project,
• browse research supported by PMC-participating funding organizations (click "Customize" to view additional funder options),
• and much more.

You can now also quickly add articles that are under a 12-month or less embargo in PMC to your search results by selecting the “Include embargoed articles” filter option under Text Availability. See the PMC User Guide for more information on these filters.

2) Reference List Display
Using related article data available in PMC, articles that cite papers that have been either retracted or named in a Findings of Research Misconduct issued by the HHS Office of Research Integrity and not yet retracted will now include a red hyperlink to the relevant notice directly from the article’s reference list. This update will help users more easily identify post-publication updates to existing research.

A large-scale update of the file names used for articles available via the PMC FTP service for bulk download was undertaken in early January 2017. The new file naming convention is PMCID-based (e.g., PMC4855680.tar.gz) rather than being built from article citation data (i.e., journal abbreviation_pub date_volume_issue_page). This update was made following user reports that the previous naming convention was resulting in missing contents in cases where citation data was duplicated across multiple articles. The new convention will ensure that file names are unique and that the corpus available via the FTP service is complete.

As we kick off a new year, we wanted to take this opportunity to look back on 2017, which was a milestone year for PMC.

Last year, PMC made nearly half a million articles available for the public to access with the support of participating journals, publisher programs, and research funders. Also, in addition to expanding support for public access to research results and the linking of those results to the underlying dataset(s), PMC released several other policy and resource updates. These include:

1. Clearer statement of scope for PMC (see also the updated entry in the NLM Collection Development Manual for “Journals”);
2. Guidance for journals on reapplying to PMC;
3. Policy statements on the scientific, editorial, and technical standards for PMC (including details on the journal reevaluation process), the supply of back content, the eligibility of non-English language journals, and the maintenance of publishing schedules;
4. Production data requirements for PMC-participating journals; and
5. Major update to the PMC Article Previewer, a tool that allows publishers to see or “preview” how articles will appear in PMC and resolve data problems prior to submission.

In September, NLM recognized the achievements to date in the Wellcome Trust and NLM Biomedical Journal Digitization project, which has added a dozen new historical titles and more than a half million pages to the PMC archive. The PMC archive now includes content from as far back as the late 18th century.

Many thanks all our participants and users for a wonderful year!

Collaboration with publishers and funders to ensure the openness and preservation of the scientific record is one of PMC’s core principles. Open Access Week offers an opportunity to celebrate some of the recent outcomes of these collaborations:

• In July 2018, the PMC corpus of publicly accessible articles hit 5 million articles.
• In May 2018, the PMC Open Access Subset surpassed the 2 million article mark.
• The Author Manuscript Collection now includes more than 500,000 papers for text mining.
• The PMC and Research Funder Policy page underwent an update in September 2018 to increase transparency around funder support in PMC for publishers, authors, and the public.
• Funder policy support in PMC has been extended to the US Department of Homeland Security, in addition to several new US private research funders via the Health Research Alliance.

In FY2018 more than 200 new journals committed to archiving their complete contents in PMC, to be made publicly accessible in 12 months or less.

Peer review documents, including review reports and editor decision letters, are increasingly being published along with the articles they review. This practice is intended to make the publishing process more transparent. To support these efforts, PMC’s Tagging Guidelines have been updated to include the tagging of peer review documents. NLM encourages PMC-participating publishers, journals, and data providers to review this guidance. Please contact us at pubmedcentral@ncbi.nlm.nih.gov if you have any questions.

On March 13, 2020, the National Science and Technology Advisors from a dozen countries, including the United States, called on publishers to voluntarily agree to make their COVID-19 and coronavirus-related publications and associated data immediately accessible in PubMed Central (PMC) and other appropriate public repositories to support the ongoing public health emergency response efforts.

For more information on which publishers have responded to this call and how to discover COVID-19 and coronavirus-related publications in PMC, see the main COVID-19 Initiative page.

A FAQ is also available. If you have questions not addressed in the FAQ, please contact pmc-phe@ncbi.nlm.nih.gov.

You can learn more about how this initiative fits into the wider NLM response to the current public health emergency in Dr. Patti Brennan's post, "How Does a Library Respond to a Global Crisis?"

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